Thursday, January 12, 2017

Rome Journal: Milliareum Aureum

“All roads lead to Rome” is a famous saying and if you look
it up it derives from the Milliarium Aureum a particular stone set up by Caesar
Augustus in the vicinity of Temple of Saturn in the ancient Forum as point from which all
highways would lead. For instance if you are in Rome today you can travel on
the Via Aurelia Vecchia whose guardrails are old stone walls going back to the
Empire. Ostensibly that road would have its provenance at the same point as
every other road leading out of the old Roman Empire. Robert Moses might very
well have approved and it’s surprising he didn’t come up with a similar idea
since he was one of those souls whose grand vision of the universe generally
was constructed with his own ideas at the center. Such big thinking creates its own
nostalgia and one can admire the effectiveness of the Napoleonic Code until you read
the fine points and realize that a suspect is guilty until proven innocent.
But when you think about it Rome really set the stage for all the major
civilizations which branded themselves with codes of uniformity, bridging the gap between many cultures. Isn’t that for
instance what the many countries and unions made up of sovereign states can be
defined by? And isn’t that what has been threatened by the recent (Brexit)
revolt and other revolts against such attempts at cohesion. You
think of the thousand years of Rome. Will the United States, for instance, make
it until 2776?

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.